Intorno al brutto. Una categoria controversa

Paul Valéry, in his “Discourse on Aesthetics”, which he pronounced in 1936 in front of an audience of philosophers, reproached them, accusing aesthetics in particular of having pursued the abstract idea of beauty for too long, losing itself in the shadows of specialized terminology or in verbal games and thus forgetting the varied reality of works of art. Following an abstract idea of beauty means losing sight of the artistic object. It also means deluding oneself that the ugly is merely a counterbalance to a dominant category. But what does ugly mean? Its ambivalence lies precisely in a continuous oscillation between an evaluative and a descriptive use. There is a duplicity, so that on the one hand it expresses a negative judgment, and on the other hand - suspending its normal semantic destiny - it reclaims for itself some positivity. It is precisely from this positivity that the ugly begins its journey in the field of aesthetics.

Sobre Mallarmé

O texto abaixo é a tradução de uma conferência que Paul Valéry proferiu em 1927 sobre Mallarmé. Como os demais textos que Valéry escreveu sobre Mallarmé, é um misto de recordação do breve convívio pessoal dos dois e de análise da postura de Mallarmé face à poesia. Além disso, indiretamente, é possível ler no texto de Valéry um painel de fundo que diz muito das relações artísticas de Mallarmé e da origem do poema Um lance de dados nunca abolirá o acaso. Embora um texto breve, a análise feita por Valéry diz muito.

Poética de la culpa y la confesión en El libro vacío, de Josefina Vicens

The Empty Book (1958), by Josefina Vicens (1911-1988), has attributes which define it as a confessional work. This article analyzes the assertions of the protagonist of the novel José García when he experiences a deep guilt and appeals to be ambiguously forgiven for trying to write a perfect book. The guilt and the confession, predominant in the text, are tackled through the following: the rhetorical technique captatio benevolentiae; the narrator’s larval state and stripping (La Confesión. Género literario, by María Zambrano); the silence’s imposition and unfathomable condition (The Writing of the Disaster, by Maurice Blanchot); the summit of being and the incompletion as a goal (Notebooks, by Paul Valéry); the ghost novel (The Preparation of the Novel, by Roland Barthes); and the dependent or conditioned beauty, as well as the free or self-sufficient beauty (Critique of Judgment, by Immanuel Kant).